The Features of Capitalism
Each year unsafe injections cause 23 million hepatitis cases worldwide – 21 million Hepatitis B (HBV) and 2 million Hepatitis C (HCV). This is 32% of all HBV infections and 40% of all HCV infections. (Source: Hauri 2004)
Reuse Facts
The issue of hypodermic syringe re-use is responsible for a staggering amount of disease transmission in the world. The cost of treating the infections caused by syringe re-use is enormous not to mention the suffering caused.
The solution, a non-re-usable syringe which snaps or jams after one use has been developed by several sources. Why has this life saving idea not been immediately implemented?
In 1984 Marc Koska started work on developing the non-reusable K1 auto-disable syringe in response to the AIDs epidemic. It took 17 years to sell the first one, but since then has sold 5 billion through his non-profit charity SafePoint:
– WHO urged global use of ‘smart syringes’
Vivienne met Marc Koska 5 years ago at a Google conference in Brussels.
He was there to meet Margaret Chan, the head of the WHO (World Health Organisation) in the attempt to get them to create a mandate for safe syringe use. After 25 years of trying to promote his device a mandate from them was vital. A mandate would co-ordinate & direct all the disparate factors involved from production to sales to use, enabling manufacturers to make higher volume sales & thereby to make a worthwhile profit, the driving force behind a business.
Marc’s meeting was successful but it still took another 5 years (& millions more lives) until this 23rd February 2015 for WHO to finally initiate a worldwide official campaign to eradicate the use of the dirty needle.
Why has this life saving device taken 3 decades to be taken seriously?
Marc says: “There is a very basic reason why it hasn’t happened and that is because the manufacturers haven’t had a market,” he argues. “If the manufacturers could sell a product and it was identified where they were going to sell it and who was going to pay for it, they would make it.
“The core of it is that manufacturers have no incentive. Manufacturers control all this, as they have all the money. Syringes are a commodity. There is a very low margin on disposable medical products. So you say to the manufacturer, ‘let’s all make better products’, and they say ‘why?’ because there’s no guarantee that anyone is going to buy them.”
Another case is the story of Thomas Shaw: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_syringe who approached two lawyers, Mike Weiss and Paul Danzinger in 1998 because he ‘’was having trouble selling a safety syringe developed to protect health care workers from accidentally being infected by dirty needles. The problems were due to monopolistic actions of a major industry needle maker and hospital group purchasing organizations. The case was settled before trial for $150 million.[5] This was portrayed by the 2011 movie Puncture.[6] Thomas Shaw’s attempts to get his retractable needle accepted by health care facilities was related in the Jul/Aug 2010 Washington Monthly article, “Dirty Medicine”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_David_Weiss
The problem with Capitalism is that it puts profits before lives.
I am so happy about all this posts and hope that more people will start reading those. A few years ago I saw a documentary about the replacement of glass-based syringes to the disposable ones: a convenient thing for the industry to maximize their profit. It only works well in developped countries but on the costs of the health in undevelopped ones, it’s all well shown in the article. And it just goes on and on, and the conclusion that capitalism with its main dogma of profit is driven by an enormous ignorance towards not only human but the world in its whole suffering, even complete acceptance of its damaging effects, is so obvious that the still ongoing denying of this coherence is devastating.
Thanks for this brilliant website!
Comment by Ivana Milos on 02/09/2017 at 11:48 am